I am a social historian of capitalism and most of my work tackles the capitalist institutions and practices characterising the “periphery”: be it Eastern Europe or Latin America. After completing my bachelor degree at the University of Bucharest, I have spent most of my graduate years at Central European University (Budapest) where I still work as a PhD candidate.

Some of my research interests include: comparative historical sociology, financial anthropology, economic sociology and the political economy of Eastern Europe. Although most of my work can be easily seen as belonging to the fields of comparative sociology and/or economic anthropology, I have a long-lasting partiality for the concept of “social history” and the traditions associated with it; a social history which I somewhat arbitrarily define as a felicitous intertwining of painstaking archival research with critical practice.

At the moment I am writing a dissertation focusing on the development of the Romanian credit system after the Great Depression. Centred on the problem of private debt 1930s credit practices, the project fleshes out the manner in which the interwar capitalist crisis reconfigured the relationship between political subjects, state institutions and the economic field at the European outskirts. In this way, by tackling a manageable archival material, the dissertation seeks to describe the emergence of a new type of capitalist formation. The outcome of these changes, the post-liberal capitalist state developed in Romania after the Great Depression, represented a global co-creation: the result of a constant interaction between international organizations and expertise networks (League of Nations, transnational creditors, central banks) and local class dynamics. I am currently planning to develop this research into a post-doc project through a comparison with interwar Yugoslavia and Brazil.

My last years have been spent moving around Eastern Europe with occasional stints in New York. The scattered notes in the blog section of this site spring from my stays throughout these regions: their archives, their cities, their books and buildings, their social movements and the friends living here. Besides my work, I am also a co-editor of the platform Lefteast, writing occasional opinion pieces in various venues.